billpalmer.net

Accomplishment is not the same thing as making a difference, and quite often the accomplishments you're most proud of are things that no one outside of yourself and your immediate circle will ever know about or would even care about anyway. Over the past few months my (professional) accomplishments have begun to take place more in the public eye; for instance I've grown accustomed to people I don't know very well congratulating me on the accomplishment of landing one big name interview after another. But that doesn't mean I've actually made a difference. After all, you don't change anything by managing to be one of dozens interviews some famous person happens to grant during a period of heavy promotion.

A few folks have told me they thought I made a difference back in March when Adam Duritz of Counting Crows laid out his manifesto for the future of the music industry in an iProng Magazine cover story. In fact one musician told me that reading that story caused him to change his strategy for his own band. But if you listen to the audio of that interview, I didn't really have to do anything to get that story out of Duritz; he was going to tell that story to any journalist who wasn't going to cut him off. All I can really take credit for was understanding that what he was saying was important and including it in my story.

But this week was different. I interviewed Ed Roland of Collective Soul for fairly straightforward reasons: I own every album they've ever released, I've seen them in concert too many times to count, and the ten million albums they've sold tells me that readers would be interested as well. Worthwhile for me, worthwhile for the readers, done deal. But somewhere during the interview process I figured it out: Collective Soul was the rare famous band that was in an ideal position to go podsafe with seemingly nothing standing in their way. After all, when the lead singer of the band is also the owner of the record label, there's not likely to be a whole lot of red tape involved. So when Ed started asking me for iPhone buying advice during our interview, and I asked him for his thoughts on podcasting and he simply said "educate me," I took my shot. I told him that we would be using the audio recording of the interview on our podcast, and that it would be great if we could use the latest single as well. And he said yes. Told me to send the details to his people. By golly, it worked.

What does "podsafe" mean? It's pretty straightforward, really. As a podcaster, you don't have the right to play someone's copyrighted song in your show unless you have specific permission to do so. The popular notion that you can use up to thirty seconds of a song without permission, or that you acquire the right to use the song simply by buying the CD? Nothing more than unfortunate myths.

Granting permission on a case by case basis would be a nightmare for everyone involved, so people with more foresight than me created a Podsafe Music Network, in effect a clearing house for granting blanket rights for using songs in podcasts. Indie artists have flocked to it. In fact some of them have built their entire careers out of getting their songs played on podcasts and then seeing that popularity turn into album sales (the exact same reason bands send their songs to FM radio). But because all four major record labels apparently attended the same conference where someone spent a great deal of time and effort misinforming them about what a podcast actually is, getting any of the major labels to allow their artists' music to become podsafe is roughly equivalent to throwing eggs at a brick wall - you can keep trying all day long, but at the end you haven't made a dent. They're so sure that a podcast has something to do with streaming, and that you can somehow make it not downloadable, or that the embedded song would somehow only be available for a limited timeframe before it magically went poof, that it's not even a conversation you can keep a straight face while having with them.

But with Collective Soul not having been on a major label since 2001, and with the indie label controlled by the band and not the other way around, it was Ed Roland's call all the way. And sure enough, the day before we released the issue with Collective Soul on the cover, their latest single was officially added to the podsafe network. They'd have been this week's cover story one way or the other. After all, I requested the interview because they make great music, nothing more. But when the opportunity presented itself, I took my shot at making a difference, and surprisingly enough, it actually happened.

From our end all is means is that we got to play the song at the end of the Ed Roland interview which we released as a podcast episode the same day the magazine issue was released (a nifty little bit of hindsight-obvious synergy I wish I'd picked up on from the get-go). Far more importantly, any podcaster in the whole wide world can now play the new Collective Soul song on their shows. And a number already have, including some rather influential ones. Plenty more will soon.

What does it all add up to? Time will tell. Hopefully two things happen: one, other famous bands will take a cue from Collective Soul and perhaps convince their labels to allow them to try it themselves, and two, the mere fact that a famous band has thrown its hat into the podsafe ring will hopefully help shine a brighter light on the wealth of talented-but-yet-unknown-outside-of-podcasting-circles musicians who've been making their music podsafe for years.

Time will tell. But it feels like after interviewing all these rock stars, lining up all these cover stories, and after receiving so many congratulations on accomplishing something that hasn't necessarily changed anything, this week I might have finally made a tangible difference in an industry I've only begun covering fairly recently. Hopefully it's not the last time.